When it comes right down to it, developing a critical sensibility about parenting isn't really about disapproval; it's about honing your own sensibilities, figuring out how you want to parent.
I can spot empty flattery and know exactly where I stand. In the end it's really only my own approval or disapproval that means anything.
My theory is that one needs to be loved completely, unconditionally, and unfettered by parental disapproval, if one is to get happily through life which, after all, presents its own hurdles.
It's said that you can tell a lot about someone by who opposes them. In the case of liberal pundit Bill Maher - a man who called America's actions cowardly in the wake of 9/11 and who mocked WWII veterans who wanted to visit the monument built in their honor - I wear his disapproval of me as a badge of honor.
I think there is this rage on campuses about Donald Trump and - as someone who has written pretty explicitly about my disapproval of Trump - I can sympathize with that.
But I found that disappointing people is a good thing, because disapproval is freedom.
When you look at a Congress that has an 84 percent disapproval rating, that means that for the most part, the people of this country, and certainly California, are looking for new leadership.
It is in the province of home and society that woman has fashioned the customs. Here, women's approval and disapproval, wishes and wants, have been quite as formative and reformative as the action of the sea on the mainland.
While foreign competitors, French or Japanese or German, merrily bid for contracts abroad, American companies find themselves tangled in a web of legislation designed to express disapproval, block trade in certain commodities, or perhaps deny resources to disfavored or hostile regimes.
The idea of Seth Rogen as the Green Hornet so inflaming the fanboy community is amusing, since that group's 20/50 vision also had it tsking its disapproval about Michael Keaton as Batman and Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man.
